Penelope Fitzgerald and I taught together in the 1960s at the Westminster
Tutors, an institution that prepared students, almost all female, for the
long-abolished entrance exams to Oxford and Cambridge. We sat together in
the small staff room on sagging sofas, amid a rich and pervasive smell of
old upholstery and decaying dogs. Penelope was contradictory. She could
appear vague and self-effacing - and was.
She could also say knowledgeable and percipient things about literature. She
was generous and exacting. She once rebuked me for not understanding that
one of her pupils had a touch of genius. It did not occur to me, young as I
was and obsessed with literature and small children, that she might herself
have more than a touch of genius. She was interesting to know, but not easy
to get to know well.
I was surprised, and pleased, as I struggled on with my own children and my
own teaching and my own need to write, to see that Penelope had become a
novelist. I had not been surprised to be told that she had written a
biography of Burne-Jones. She was just and scholarly. I had not read her
other biographies.
When she won the Booker Prize with Offshore I was delighted, and immediately
read it. I think I then read almost all her books, more or less as they came
out. I admired them. They had a finished, separate quality. They were funny
and terrible. There was something self-sufficient about those early works. I
admired the craft, still without thinking of genius.
She said about Human Voices that she wished I would write something in the TLS
or somewhere to point out that it was based on a German poem, by Heine, Der
Asra. I hadn't noticed that, and I don't know how she expected anyone to do
so. “Asra” to me was Coleridge's transposition of Sara in his diaries and
love letters. But I felt challenged. I reread Human Voices, and I read Der
Asra, a perfect, moving, chilling, brief poem, and I saw that Penelope
Fitzgerald was not an English lady writer - in many of these letters she is
putting on an act as one - but someone with an austere, original talent. I
don't think I then said “genius” to myself. It isn't a word I much use.
In the light of these letters we can see what parts of Fitzgerald's own life
served as raw material for the earlier novels. This makes me, as a writer
and reader, feel uneasy. The connections, the sources, are there, and yet
there is something hermetic, something completed, about good novels of the
kind that Fitzgerald wrote. Personal novels such as Dundy's The Dud Avocado
or Jong's Fear of Flying almost take off from their authors' lives and flow
back into them. Fitzgerald made messy life into finished art - even if it
was a finished observation about the messiness of life.
It was when I read the last three novels, Innocence, The Beginning of Spring
and The Blue Flower, that I came to understand - hindered by meeting her
long before I read them - that she was a great writer. Each is different;
each takes a whole world of history, knowledge, politics and literature and
turns it into something at once suggestive and complete, full of newly
created people and newly connected ideas. One is Italian, one is Russian,
one is German. All are about tragi-comic, fallible human beings in a world
that is political and spiritual, sketched in with the sureness of an artist
who knows enough to know exactly what details to put elegantly in place to
make a whole. This is perhaps most remarkable of all in the Prussia of Von
Hardenberg, in The Blue Flower - otherwise known as the poet Novalis. She
told me that she had read the records of the salt mines from cover to cover
in German to understand how her hero was employed - then in a few sketched
details she places the mines, in his daily life and in his thought about the
scientific and spiritual world.
It was at this point only that I read The Knox Brothers, her biography of her
father and uncles. I read the book looking for its author, not for its
subjects. And I have come to see how much the austere perfectionist - with a
wicked sense of humour - is descended from that family of bishops, saints,
dons, idealists, intellects. She effaces herself, referring to her birth
only as that of a “daughter”, and her observations as those of “a niece”.
I'm not sure that I have read a better-written biography. The quality of the
writing is derived partly from an exact, matter-of-fact, wildly funny wit in
the descriptions. The other part comes from a scrupulous respect for the
spiritual lives of the four brothers. Hermione Lee asked her in an interview
if she would say anything about her feminist or political beliefs.
Fitzgerald corrected her; she hoped that the readers would be interested in
her spiritual beliefs.
The Knox Brothers opens with their grandfather, the missionary Thomas French,
who travelled and died taking Christianity to the Afghans and the North West
Frontier. Penelope comments: “Today he would certainly be asked: why not
leave these people to their own beliefs? Why press on them something they
did not ask for and do not want? To this his reply would be: ‘The viewing of
the unseen world instead of the visible things of time - this cannot be a
shallow matter; it must be deep or not at all - no halves in such a
business.'”
The four brothers inherited this absolute vision. Ronald Knox became a
Catholic and distressed his father, an Anglican bishop. Wilfred made
unworldly, precise vows of poverty and celibacy and joined the Oratory of
the Good Shepherd. Penelope comments sharply on people who saw him as a
delightful eccentric, unconcerned like the birds of the air: “This idea was
particularly irritating. Wilfred was the young man who had chosen his ties
in the Burlington Arcade, and he loved good wine, good tea and the best
tobacco. But renunciation must never be seen in terms of loss.”
Dillwyn, a mathematician who helped to break the codes of the Enigma machine,
was as resolute an unbeliever as those two brothers were believers. Penelope
respects that. She describes him in 1916, recruiting Ronnie - “an unlikely
figure in clerical garb” - to naval intelligence: “To Dilly, all the
long-drawn-out [family] suffering over his youngest brother was a matter of
unrealities; we pray, no one answers, the Churches dispute to the death over
how to go on speaking to someone who is not there.”
It is in Dillwyn's logical and startling company that “his niece, confined for
what seemed an eternity to a boarding school at nearby High Wycombe”, makes
a rare appearance. He brings her back late, and confronts the outraged
housemistress, who said: “Rules are made to be kept”, with the answer: “But
they are defined only by being broken.”
It has rightly been said that Penelope wrote wonderfully about children.
Terence Dooley makes the caveat that she liked children, not when they were
babies or infants, but “when they had reached the age of reason”. (“Ronnie's
niece” makes another appearance, rebuked by Evelyn Waugh for wanting to
leave Ronnie's 60th birthday party early “to look after her baby”. Waugh
“snapped ‘Children! Nonsense! Nothing so easily replaceable.'”)
She tells us of the Knox family, when their mother was sickening: “There was
an atmosphere, so frightening to children, of things not being quite right,
and of discussions behind closed doors.” She says of her father that “the
blow of this death was one from which, in a very long life, he never quite
recovered. It gave him, at twelve years old, a spartan endurance and a
determination not to risk himself too easily to life's blows, which might at
times have been mistaken for coldness.”
The children in whom Penelope is most interested are - in common with the
Knoxes - like Penelope herself: beings who combine clarity of thought with a
sense of the existence of the unseen world. They are also perfectionists.
The boy actor, in At Freddie's, practising a jump from a wall again and
again may well have died in the search for perfection. Both Hardenberg and
his young brother have the same absolutism.
They inconvenience others, yet are to be loved and understood and respected.
There is something of the same quality in the midget child in Innocence, and
by extension in the young Italians in that book. The quality is indeed a
form of innocence.
There is a comic version of it in the boy, observed by Penelope's father at
Rugby, who stopped the school clock with an accurately aimed squash ball. It
turned out that the boy had been practising the shot for two years. The
headmaster called this “un-English”. Eddie did not agree. The patient,
self-contained, self-imposed pursuit of an entirely personal solution seemed
to him most characteristically English.
It is this sense - for she resembled her family, and knew it, as well as
observing it clearly - that Penelope Fitzgerald is an English novelist. She
is not a novelist of manners, though she observes them wickedly, nor of
class, though she understands it. She writes very English versions of
European metaphysical fables.
I spoke to her, possibly for the last time, at one of the award parties for
the Cohen Prize. She looked distracted, as she usually did at parties. I
asked her if she was writing, and she looked at me searchingly and asked:
“How do you think of a novel?”
I don't know how she thought of the ones she wrote. I don't know what they can
have been like in the planning. She made it appear a question of extreme
difficulty. I do not think reading her letters will answer it either -
though they illuminate other things. Instead, their reader will enjoy being
in the company of Penelope's courtesy and intelligence. And then will ask
for him or herself: “How do you think of a novel?” And understand the
difficulty of the question.
So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald with a
preface by A. S.Byatt
Fourth Estate, £25; 624pp
Buy
the book
Extract
from Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald
“Are we to gather that Dreadnought is asking us all to do something
dishonest?” Richard asked.
Dreadnought nodded, glad to have been understood so easily.
“Just as a means of making a sale. It seems the only way round my problem. If
all present wouldn't mind agreeing not to mention my main leak, or rather
not to raise the question of my main leak, unless direct enquires are made.”
“Do you in point of fact want us to say that Dreadnought doesn't leak?” asked
Richard patiently.
“That would be putting it too strongly.”
All the meetings of the boat-owners, by a movement as natural as the tides
themselves, took place on Richard's converted Ton class minesweeper. Lord
Jim, a felt reproof to amateurs, in speckless, always-renewed grey paint,
over-shadowed the other craft and was nearly twice their tonnage, just as
Richard, in his decent dark blue blazer, dominated the meeting itself. And
yet he by no means wanted this responsibility. Living on Battersea Reach,
overlooked by some very good houses, and under the surveillance of the Port
of London Authority, entailed, surely, a certain standard of conduct.
Richard would be one of the last men on earth or water to want to impose it.
Yet someone must. Duty is what no one else will do at the moment.
Fortunately he did not have to define duty. War service in the RNVR, and his
whole temperament before and since, had done that for him.
Richard did not even want to preside. He would have been happier with a
committee, but the owners, of whom several rented rather than owned their
boats, were not of the substance from which the committees are formed.
Between Lord Jim, moored almost in the shadow of Battersea Bridge, and the
old wooden Thames barges, two hundred yards upriver and close to the rubbish
disposal wharfs and the brewery, there was a great gulf fixed. The
barge-dwellers, creatures neither of firm land nor water, would have liked
to be more respectable than they were.
They aspired towards the Chelsea shore, where, in the early 1960s, many
thousands lived with sensible occupations and adequate amounts of money. But
a certain failure, distressing to themselves, to be like other people,
caused them to sink back, with so much else that drifted or was washed up,
into the mud moorings of the great tideway.
Five Penelope Fitzgerald works to read, as recommended by Kate Saunders
The Knox Brothers (1977)
A group biography of Fitzgerald's father “Evoe” Knox, a legendary editor of
Punch, and his brilliant brothers - uber-Catholic Ronald and fierce atheist
Dillwyn. Buy
the book from Books First £7.59 including free delivery
Offshore (1979)
An elegant comic novel about houseboat-dwellers in 1960s Battersea. Do they
belong in the water, or on dry land? Winner of the 1979 Booker Prize. Buy
the book from Books First £6.64 including free delivery
Charlotte Mew and Her Friends (1984)
An exquisite and deeply moving life of the early 20th century poet, which
illuminates both the woman and her verse. Buy
the book from Books First £8.54 including free delivery
The Blue Flower (1995)
A novel about the life and the mind of the 18th Century philosopher, Novalis
- watch out for the description of the washing of a year's-worth of dirty
linen. Buy
the book from Books First £7.59 including free delivery
Selected Prose (2002)
The essential bedside collection of Fitzgerald's essays and reviews;
fragments of an incisive and original critical mind.
